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9:24 PM, Central Sunny Day Light Savings Time, March 21, 2007
Dear CopyNighters:
Happy 27th hour of Spring!
I will not be able to make it to our next CopyNight meeting (7:00 PM, Wednesday, March 28, 2007). If anyone else is interested in hosting this meeting, please contact me. (615-791-7455; emh666@aol.com)
I will be speaking to the Digital Millennium Copyright Society at Middle Tennessee State University (I hear they call it M-T-S-U) the following night (6:30 PM, Thursday, March 29, 2007) at the John Bragg Mass Comm Bldg, Rm 151. The title: "Mashups, MP3's, New Issues and Challenges in Music Copyright: Real Life Copyright Issues From A Music Expert Witness." If you are free and want to drive to the Southeastern edge of the world, down I-24 for dozens of miles, please come on out.
The mission statement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Society:
"The Digital Millennium Copyright Society aims to educate its members through
active debate and research into new and futuristic aspects of intellectual property
and the creative industries. By engaging compelling and informative speakers,
DMCS gives members unique opportunities to build substantial networks and gain
unique insight into the ever changing world of copyright."

Also, Leadership Music's 2007 Digital Summit will take place on Belmont Blvd., Nashville, on Tuesday, April 24, 2007. Fortunately, I am not speaking at that this year. I can simply sit back and listen, and be grateful that I do not think like David Israelite or those who think the copyright term should be the life of God plus 70 years. Here is the schedule:
http://digitalsummit.org/schedule.html
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Wow - this article seems to be the buzz of almost every one of the email societies to which I belong:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117444575607043728.html?mod=hps_us_pageone

Here's the opening of today's front page Wall Street Journal dirge:

Sales of Music,
Long in Decline,
Plunge Sharply
Rise in Downloading
Fails to Boost Industry;
A Retailing Shakeout
By ETHAN SMITH
March 21, 2007
In a dramatic acceleration of the seven-year sales decline that has battered the music industry, compact-disc sales for the first three months of this year plunged 20% from a year earlier, the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music.
The sharp slide in sales of CDs, which still account for more than 85% of music sold, has far eclipsed the growth in sales of digital downloads, which were supposed to have been the industry's salvation.
[Music]
The slide stems from the confluence of long-simmering factors that are now feeding off each other, including the demise of specialty music retailers like longtime music mecca Tower Records. About 800 music stores, including Tower's 89 locations, closed in 2006 alone.
Apple Inc.'s sale of around 100 million iPods shows that music remains a powerful force in the lives of consumers. But because of the Internet, those consumers have more ways to obtain music now than they did a decade ago, when walking into a store and buying it was the only option.
Today, popular songs and albums -- and countless lesser-known works -- can be easily found online, in either legal or pirated forms. While the music industry hopes that those songs will be purchased through legal services like Apple's iTunes Store, consumers can often listen to them on MySpace pages or download them free from other sources, such as so-called MP3 blogs.
Jeff Rabhan, who manages artists and music producers including Jermaine Dupri, Kelis and Elliott Yamin, says CDs have become little more than advertisements for more-lucrative goods like concert tickets and T-shirts. "Sales are so down and so off that, as a manager, I look at a CD as part of the marketing of an artist, more than as an income stream," says Mr. Rabhan. "It's the vehicle that drives the tour, the merchandise, building the brand, and that's it. There's no money."

YIKES....... What a century in which we live!
Hope all is well. See you in April, or sooner.
E. Michael